Dietary Dissidence

[H]umans are omnivores. Neither the “meat-as-a-condiment” wisdom of the heart-healthy scientists nor the “carbs-as-a-condiment” faith that now passes for “paleo” is persuasive to me. In a 2014 paper in the Journal of Human Evolution, Amanda Henry and her colleagues found that even our Neanderthal cousins ate barley broth along with their steaks. Once thought of as extreme carnivores, Neanderthals were actually diet opportunists, just like our own direct ancestors.

I first headed down the paleo road in the early aughts after reading Loren Cordain’s book. The appeal was twofold. Like him, I had difficulty accepting that animal fats cause heart disease in light of our physical traits obviously evolved for omnivorism; and I shared his enthusiasm for moving away from subsidized, vacuous, and overprocessed (and I say over because all food is processed to some extent — nobody is eating raw bison liver Revanant-style) corn- and wheat-based slop in favor of fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Yet over the years I’ve watched the paleo movement transmogrify into crazed anti-carbohydrate zealotry. Based on my wanderings around the blogosphere, I think a lot of adherents arrive at paleo’s doorstep from a weight-loss perspective and become radicalized by making mad gainz in those early months of low carb intake. Further, many of these folks don’t seem to do a lot of sustained aerobic exercise (Crossfit doesn’t count) and so don’t recognize that carbs are — and were — a necessary component for endurance. From running distances longer than a 5K to eatingwhite rice to drinking beer (no one will take away my beer *sound of racking shotgun*), I am undoubtedly an apostate in paleos’ eyes.

In his last graf, Konner compares the paleo diet to vegetarianism or keeping kosher or halal, which is apt. All diets are less about nutrition and more about anxiety over pollution. The more strict and obsessive the diet — from the vegan to the raw-fooder to the paleo wringing his hands over a teaspoon of honey in his morning tea — the more high-strung the personality, which is arguably more malignant to well-being than any pound of butter. “All of these strategies — low-carb paleo diets, too — seem to be compatible with life and health,” Konner writes. Reasonableness? What an old-fashioned idea.